Ok... today I had a little time si I discovered a parking garage that had a roof one could park on. So I paid $.25 and took advantage of the beautiful sunset (it has been very grey around here for a while). I even remebered to use my polorized lense. And I experimented with opening my lense some more (I seem to always have it on 5.5).
Please be brutal. I know I have to clean my lense... so dont bug me on that. But anything else is fair game.

1)

2) THE ORIGNAL
OK, this is the original, how can I get better contrast when I am out taking pictures? I am so tired of fixing it when I get home.

3)

4)

5)

If these are all just crap, please give me some ideas on how I can capture them better for the future. It was 16 degrees (F) today, so I was not willing to stay out to long in the cold. When it gets warmer, I would like to try again. Thanks in advance for all your comments and brutal critques.:mrgreen:

Maybe it's just me, but the upper-right corner of #4 draws my attention there. I really like that pic, but that corner really distracts me. Unless a corner is the focus of the pic (which it rarely is), there should be nothing "special" about it. In this case, the rooftop and sky should meet far enough away from the corner (either at the top or right of the frame) that it's not distracting. Did that make sense?

so should I have had a more paralle? I did really really crop the picture. There was tons more sky. But I do not want people too look at the top corner. Should I add more sky to the right of the frame? Or just try again taking the picture on another sunset day?

Well, I don't quite see things the way Cal does, to me that corner meeting the corner of the frame looks good, I like your crop. I also like the light you had and the sky (cool, blue skies!, rare sight!) ... and I like the pp-work on your first pic here from the original. I can't tell you what to do to get your photos "right" (i.e. this well contrasted) right out of your camera. I can set mine to different parametres, but actually I quite like to have control over these things in pp myself, much rather than have an automatic in-camera parametre-setting take the decision off me. So I don't mind the pp-work.

I sometimes like the pp work afterwards (infact I get quite bummed when there is nothing to do), But when I often make mistakes, like with contrast, I know there is an area I need to improve in with taking the picture.

Maybe this will make my first post a little more clear (but you don't have to take my advice). In #4, the sky and house meet and form a line that runs from the top-right corner, down and to the left. That line intersects the frame at the top-right corner. I would have framed/cropped it so the line intersects the frame a little to the left of where it currently does, instead.